


i’m a fire (i’ll keep your brittle heart warm)

by uchiharvno



Series: passed down like folk songs, our love lasts so long [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), not hatefucking but is hatecuddling a thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:56:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27701711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uchiharvno/pseuds/uchiharvno
Summary: She pulls her elbow back and levels her first with his face threateningly. “Speak of Edelgard’s head one more time and I will knock your teeth out, your highness.”
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth
Series: passed down like folk songs, our love lasts so long [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1887400
Comments: 1
Kudos: 56





	i’m a fire (i’ll keep your brittle heart warm)

**Author's Note:**

> "the devil's in the details/ but you got a friend in me/ would it be enough/ if i could never give you peace?"
> 
> \- peace // t.s.

Byleth presses two fingers to her temple. It’s too much. Her former students and faculty colleagues are speaking over one another, half of their little group wants to find Rhea as soon as possible while the rest wants to take back their home and Dimitri just…  _ seethes _ , clenches and unclenches his hands, shakes his head every so often as though he’s having his own argument with voices only he can hear. This and she’s still reeling from the bizarreness of rousing from a five-year slumber and walking right into all of this, all at once. 

Finally, Gilbert calls on her. Steeling herself, Byleth rejoins the conversation. The voices die down and Dimitri’s lone eye burns holes into her face. He folds his arms over his chest, challenging her. “You were entrusted with leading the church. One would think the logical step is to march to Enbarr. If Lady Rhea is being held prisoner in the Empire, we don’t have time to waste taking back Fhirdiad. Can you deny it?” 

“Yes,” she says confidently. He scoffs. “We are outnumbered. You saw as much when they attacked the monastery–and that was just a small portion of their force. We wouldn’t even make it to Enbarr before we’re  _ slaughtered _ !”

They are not a unified front. Their King is unhinged and the Archbishop’s proxy is at a loss. The Empire would take this weakness to their advantage.

“We’re stronger than them!” he insists, speaking through gritted teeth in anger and frustration. “You,  _ alone _ , could have taken all of them!”

“You overestimate me–and yourself.”

If he had been like a wild animal pacing in his cage a while ago, now he was a predator towering over his prey. Dimitri squares his shoulders and lifts his chin. His blue eye is icy and full of derision, one of Fhirdiad’s very own biting and unforgiving blizzards. He lets his arms fall to his sides and begins walking away. “I never took you for a coward, professor.”

“Watch it, boar!” Felix warns and she hears Ingrid chastise him for it. 

The room falls silent and she could feel the uneasiness in the air. The tension, the confusion, the disappointment–this isn’t the reunion any of them dreamed of five years ago and that definitely is not the Dimitri they once knew.

All eyes remain on Byleth, looking to her for answers that she doesn’t think she could give. She feels a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Maybe we should give him some time to himself,” Mercedes says, kind and understanding as ever. But Byleth has never been either.

“Like hell,” she mutters, running after him. She pauses when she finds him in the corridor, his back to her as he took long, purposeful strides towards the monastery’s entrance. “And I never took you to be brash and delusional!”

Dimitri falters. Walking towards him, she could hear the hitch of his breath then a low growl. Then he turns around slowly, with his jaws set and contempt in his visible eye, so intense that Byleth stops short just a couple of feet away from him. 

It still surprises her, how so far removed this man is from the house leader she once knew. No more are his kind smile and his gentle gaze and his smooth speech that easily turns into a stuttering, blundering mess when he finds himself flustered. The one before her now is… a machine with a single purpose. And she distantly remembers being one herself; relentless and unfeeling. 

“What happened to you, Dimitri?” she asks and the sound of her own voice is foreign to her ears. She’s never quite heard herself sound so broken. 

“Disappointed by what you see? Hm, so am I.” 

But she’s gotten used to this, apparently, the scalding remarks. She doesn’t even flinch anymore. He turns his back on her once again, his fur cape heavy and imposing on his broad shoulders. He begins walking away from her again and a burning heat rises from deep within her–anger and frustration she realizes, as her nostrils flare with a heavy exhale. “I’m going to Enbarr by myself–”

Byleth shoves him, and it catches him off-guard enough that he actually stumbles forward. But Dimitri is quick to recover himself and even quicker to retaliate, and the next thing she knows, pain is exploding all across her back as he slams her to the wall, pinning her in place with a gloved hand tight around her neck. There’s a brief flash of realization and panic on his face, as if the attack had been involuntary on his part, but Byleth’s already grabbing his wrist, turning on her side, and knocking her elbow back into his face. 

She switches their positions, grabbing Dimitri as he staggers back and pushes him up against the wall, holding him in place by the shoulder. She pulls her elbow back and levels her first with his face threateningly. “Speak of Edelgard’s head one more time and I will knock your teeth out,  _ your highness _ .”

The only times she felt such overwhelming anger was when she had faced Solon and Kronya to avenge her father’s death, then at Edelgard’s betrayal at the Holy Tomb. She didn’t think it possible to feel this way about someone who is so far from being her enemy. Dimitri, on the other hand, feels as though he’s finally awoken for the first time in five years.

She’s rattled him enough to silence his nightmares for a moment and he’s hit with the full-blown realization that she is here, she is real,  _ alive _ . She isn’t just another ghost haunting him. The fury in her eyes and the snarl on her face makes him shiver. Almost without thinking, he lifts his hand and grips the ends of her hair in his fingers. She gasps softly at the contact, narrowed eyes widening slightly in surprise.

These strands had been a deeper, darker shade once upon a time and he’s reminded now that he’s already lost her twice in this lifetime. Engulfed by darkness, slipping through the cracks of the parting earth…

He cups the nape of her neck and pulls her forward, crashing her mouth to his. Hard. 

The professor only makes a sound of surprise but she doesn’t pull away to deck him like he knows he deserves. Instead, she melts against him and meets his lips with an intensity he could match all too well, her raised fist softening and lowering to grip the fur of his cloak to pull him even closer. 

_ Real _ , he affirms, caressing her jaw with his thumb until she parts her lips and touches her tongue to his, their hot breaths mingling together.  _ Alive _ . 

By the time they break apart, Byleth is the one pressed against the wall again, Dimitri’s tall frame completely eclipsing her. He’s looking at her in surprise yet again, as though he hadn’t meant to kiss her either. That’s part of new Dimitri’s charm, she supposes; he’s driven by impulse. Another reason they couldn’t just march to the Imperial Capital. 

“Stay with me tonight,” she pleads in a hushed whisper. She isn’t even aware of his hand on her hip until she feels his grip tighten there just as his entire body stiffens. Teeth gritted, his face is nearly twisted in a grimace and this is how she knows they’re back, the voices. She should know. She’d lived with a voice inside her head once. But Sothis was never so mean and punishing. “Please, Dimitri, just–”

“A waste of time,” he growls, in agreement with the voices in his head. She’s a distraction, his father says, while Glenn calls him a fool. Walk away, they all bemoan,  _ go to Enbarr now and bring us her head! _ But when Dimitri walks away, his fingers are around the professor’s wrist and he’s headed for the dormitories.

Her room is the same as it has always been, except there’s a layer of dust on nearly every surface. Dimitri stands in the center of it, while she locks the door behind her and closes the curtains over her windows. The memory of the last time they had been in this room together isn’t lost on either of them, and Byleth turns to him with uncertainty. Pink cheeks and eyes looking everywhere else but at him, until she turns away and shrugs her cloak off her shoulders and kicks her boots off. Then she lays down on the farthest side of her bed and lies facing the wall so that her back is to him. 

The pregnant silence is heavy in the small space and if she had a heartbeat, she’s sure that it would be deafening to her own ears by now. Byleth holds her breath in anticipation, dreading the sound of footsteps retreating away from her. But then she hears a loud thud–his heavy furs falling to the floor, she realizes–then his shoes and the clang of his metal armor… then his slow hesitant footsteps.

Byleth finally breathes again when she feels the dip of the mattress as he settles his heavy weight behind her. Without even touching her, she could feel his warmth against her back and she’s once again reminded of the time they’d shared this bed. 

She’s afraid to go further and he doesn’t push her for more. All she could think about is the absolute pleasure of it all–to have his soft lips on her skin, his rough hands heavy on her body, to have him moving deep inside her, stretching her, filling her–and the sinking, devastating feeling that consumed her afterwards. Fucking her grief away was not the reprieve they needed then and it definitely wouldn’t help now. So Byleth only turns and holds him. 

Dimitri stiffens in her arms at first, but it doesn’t take long before he’s holding her, too. Tight enough that she feels constricted by his inhumanly strong arms, that it nearly hurts, but Byleth has never been so easily breakable. 

She sifts her fingers through matted blond hair, presses the pads of her fingers into his scalp and he feels his body finally relax in her arms, hears him sigh with the exhaustion of someone who has been through too much. 

_ I should have been with him. Where was I? I should have been fighting with him.  _

“I… never gave up hope,” Dimitri says quietly. “I knew you couldn’t have…”

Died, her mind supplies. No, she wasn’t dead. She was worse off, she thinks. She was doing  _ nothing _ , stuck in an unconscious state as a war raged on. Then his grip tightens around her even more and his voice is chilling when he speaks again. “How do I know you’re not an Imperial spy?”

His doubt and distrust of her stings more than his insults do. “Because you know me,” she sighs, hoping that it’s enough.

A pause. Then, “I don’t know anyone anymore.” 

But she couldn’t blame him, could only ache for him. He’d been betrayed by the last of his family–they weren’t blood relatives but she knows that he considered Edelgard to be his family… the last person that he had from  _ before _ .

“I will never betray you,” Byleth whispers into his chest, promises, “I will lead you to Edelgard, if it’s the last thing that I do.”

Edelgard is smart and cunning, she reminds him. She hid among the students and bid her time and bolstered her forces until an opportunity to attack the Church presented itself, and that is what they must do now; lie low and wait. The Empire is as much a stronghold as Garreg Mach had once been, and it would be foolish to march to Enbarr and through the lands of Imperial allies without a clear strategy, few resources, and sparse reinforcements. “Rest, for now.” 

The ghosts curse at her in his head. The dead have waited long enough.  _ But she’s right _ , Dimitri reasons with them but his voice is so small among theirs, like a little green boy in the middle of a war council. She must feel his struggle because he holds her tighter, tucks him under her chin until he could no longer find it in him to pull away from her tender embrace. She runs her fingers through his hair, cradles his head to her chest, but she talks about Edelgard, too. Mutters the many battle plans that’s forming in her head by the second and this, at least, appeases the cursing and yelling in his head. 

This is all they do until the morning comes, hold each other and mumble strategies like they’re sweet nothings. Byleth doesn’t even realize that she’s fallen asleep until she’s not anymore. She feels the dip of the bed first, then hears the rustling of sheets, then the warmth slipping away from her. “Dimitri,” she calls out, sitting up and watching him secure his cape on his shoulders through bleary eyes. 

When he looks at her, he is as tired and sleepless as he’s always been. Everything about him is cold again. 

“This never happened, right?” he says, with a cruel tilt to his mouth. Byleth feels her throat closing up, reminded of the time she’d said those words to him. “Don’t worry. It never did.” 

* * *

Byleth finds him in the Cathedral that morning, standing before rubble. She has half the sense to come running at him with her first raised again, having found out from Gilbert that Dimitri is still pushing for taking Enbarr–even after everything they’ve talked about last night! But she sees Felix, standing by one of the pillars, also watching their former house leader. She goes to stand by him instead, the two of them seething. 

“I have a request concerning that… creature,” Felix says, never taking his eyes off of Dimitri. “I can hardly look at the thing in the state it’s in. Do something about it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

His arms, crossed over his chest, are suddenly at his sides, hands in fists as his attention snaps to hers. “Don’t just give up like that!” he says, with something akin to desperation and anger and frustration all at once. Then, more quietly, almost as if it’s a secret he’s not supposed to share, “He… never gave up on  _ you _ .”

Byleth starts, and Felix sighs. “When you fell into the earth, we spent weeks trying to find you. He was relentless. Digging through rubble day and night–like a madman. Then we had to leave, to defend our own homes from the Empire, and… we lost him.” 

He shrugs casually, but his next words are heavy with emotion. “Losing you might have been the last straw, professor.”

If she had a heartbeat, she knows it would have skipped by then, in time with the flip in her stomach. She looks at Dimitri, tall and imposing, an impenetrable fortress. Then she turns to Felix–and nearly stops with a sudden realization. 

Byleth has never been good at identifying emotions, and this boy with all his snark and sarcasm has always confused her the most. But looking at him now, she could see plainly the look of concern on his face, the way he hurts in his own way for his lost friend… “So you do care about him,” she blurts out. 

Felix turns to her with a glower. “Aren’t you on a supply run?” he bites out. “Get out of here.”

Unable to fight the tilting corners of her lips, she begins walking away. But not without one final glimpse at the forlorn figure standing before what once was an altar. He will come back to them eventually, she thinks hopefully. And when he does, she’ll be right there. 

**Author's Note:**

> yes "where was i? i should have been with him. [i should have died with him]." is a throbb reference what about it


End file.
